My summertime-winning flower

2. it’s an annual. You can start it from seed and probably enjoy flowers until the first frost, but no telling if that might come earlier than usual.

One thing about gardening now, nothing is for certain.

But one bloomer has been so outstanding in my yard this summer, I need to write about it before I forget. (Lazy Gardener’s new motto: Carpe nanosecond)

It’s a dwarf cleome.

Regular cleome, also known as spider flowers, usually sends up single stalks with (aghast!) marijuana-like leaves. Don’t try smoking this one tho.

The exotic white, pink or fuchsia flowers can reach eight inches across with a mass of delicate little petals and long stamins atop stalks that can reach four or five feet. Great back of the garden annual.

What I found at Buchanan’s Native Plants (and saw in other nurseries this past spring) is a new-to-me dwarf cleome. This one is more bushlike, although still very vertical, and tops out about 3 feet.

The flowers are smaller, maybe two inches across, but there are masses of them. What’s even more outstanding is that it was blooming when I bought it in the spring, and it never stopped.

No matter how hot it got, no matter how little or how much I watered, this little beauty bloomed on and on and on.

To put icing on the cake, it’s now a favorite of my butterflies and hummingbirds.

11 Responses

I love cleome — and it’s a pretty good reseeder too! I think lots of people who think they want perennials so they don’t have to replant every year would actually be happier with reseeding annuals. More flowers!

I’ve had this plant since spring on the most sun scorching part of my house & it’s been VERY hardy. Not only has it surpassed whiteflies, but it has grown so big that I had to wrap twine around it just to stand straight up. It’s bloomed consistently these past months excluding these last two weeks too, but I haven’t seen any “babies” nearby. It’s one of my favorites along with the similar “cat whiskers” plant.

personally, i love my roses… have them surrounding my house and intend to put them along the outer perimeter of my fence next year… they add an extra layer of security, and they just look pretty… what i love the most though it that they are as very resilient to both heat and cold… very low maintenance as well…

I haven’t worked up the courage to go look at my back yard. I returned home yesterday after being with my 4 year old granddaughter for almost a month while she was in a hospital with a very serious case of pneumonia. I know that all my herbs and most of the rest are dead because my mother-in-law told me over the phone that she was really sorry that it never occurred to her to water my plants when she came to check on the house and bring in the mail.

All things considdered, I don’t plan to complain too much about losing my plants. My granddaughter survived a very close call and I can still log on here and enjoy everybody else’s pictures. I’ll go out and look tomorrow…. maybe.

P.S. – With so many things gone I’ll have plenty of room to try some dwarf cleome next spring. Thanks for posting the picture.